Afterthought: Preface
by afterthought-palazzo
Summary: Introduction: Before the Titans.


_In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters._

_And then God said, "Let There Be Light."_

_And there was light._

* * *

He was on-the-run, a criminal escaping the light, harsh light even as he ducked into the world of the underworld, bandwidths crackling with maniacal laughter and strict tones and voices alerting each other to pursuit.

He was a post-famous man, a man with a past past, with a present present, with a future future. He was a pre-infamous man, a man with a brilliant mind, a toned body, and a irongrip will.

He was known. Known for tracking down the contracts he took, the contracts he killed, and the contracts he returned and humiliated, the contracts that disappeared because of him.

He went to Gotham, after it became city but before it went urbanized.

His name was Bruce Wayne, and he was before the Titans.

* * *

On the assassin's radar, Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, vanished. He took no contracts, took no hits, even took no offense when the new blood pointed their fingers and laughed at him. To all others, the old hands and veterans, he was simply another competitor off their trail, and several of them sighed, relieved.

In the night-turned-day of the brutish underworld several lights flickered on and off.

These were, after all, the days when everyone worked alone, and no one had thought of working together...yet.

* * *

His body burned in the residue of the hulking lights, the spotlights even as he moved from shadow to cover to shadow to the shade of a low-hanging wall, avoiding the marauding sounds of low-toned and high-toned chatter, the thuggish call-sirens of police infrequently patrolling the streets and more often patrolling the doughnut stands and shops. His fingers ached to try out the newest of his inventions, the ones that promised to become a regular part of his ensemble, his arsenal, but he had been out of touch for so long that he didn't know if, perhaps, the underworld had changed since he'd left?

Undoing the melodramatic mystique about him and letting it fall to the untamed ground, he shrugged his jacket tighter around his deceptively lean-toned frame and ducked under the threshold of the door.

He made sure to trip down the obvious step under the door, sprawling to an ungainly position. He stood up rapidly, brushing imaginary, and not-so-imaginary dust away from his khaki jacket, pulling the broad-brimmed hat lower over his head, refusing to meet the gaze of the only inhabitant.

The inhabitant looked old; more fragile even, than his lanky visitor. The flickering, rickety, half-blown lightbulb overhead swinging from frayed wire cords revealed a white, gaunt face with dull hazel eyes and limp brown hair, gelled into some semblance of richman business - yet his visitor knew full well how powerful, how vigorous, how much danger that scarecrow of a man truly contained.

"Yes?" quavered the old man.

The visitor made sure his voice quivered with nerves, one anxious hand running across the brim of his hat. "I-I'm here to take on a contract?"

The old man tilted his head back, seeking some answer in the mouldy rafters and laughed, not unkindly.

"Go on through, youngster."

The visitor made sure to jump visibly when the windows and doors sealed, and a rathole section of the wall pushed outwards to reveal a passageway.

The hand still caressing his hat made sure to clench it tightly before his stride carried him into the passageway and through it.

* * *

The common room looked as bustling as it had, twenty bounty hunters ago. The room was smoky, the faintest hints of bad breath misting up from the bar. Clinks and thuds and rattles and bawdy drinking songs announced the celebrations of contracts and hits fulfilled, and roars of cheats and hearty yells belied the gambling tables.

Above and behind the wooden stilted trestles armed with cards and roulettes and painted jugs rose the stairs to the contract boards, and it was to these that the visitor strode, projecting an aura of 'dangerous newcomer' - enough to draw curiosity but not enough to invite company. The room stilled as he wandered in ever widening spirals.

It was silent, the last banks of smoke rising from gaping maws, as the visitor walked up the creaky stairs towards the most difficult boards, the ones which cried "Veteran!" and which even the most hardened of old hands took only when they were on the down-and-down for fear of their defeat.

There had been a time when there was a backlog of exactly a hundred notices on one particular board. Most of that backlog had been cleared by Batman, in the prime of his career, and left alone after he was gone.

On the tan-furred wallpaper there was one niggling notice left of the two he'd left behind; written on yellowing paper, pinned with a tarnished brass tack. The visitor reached up to that final notice, to the awe of twenty-six pairs of eyes and the curiosity of dozens of others, tugged it out, the tack bouncing on the parquet floor, once, twice; and ripped it into quarters, neatly.

It had read only four, faded words:

"Protect this city unti-"

* * *

While the room erupted back into its bustling not long after the visitor had left, a scrawny young man tilted his head and contemplated his navel.

He had seen, under the visitor's jacket, a flash of a steel emblem. It was one that, he knew, would soon comprise his whole life's ambitions -

- for he had taken that other notice, which had read only two simple words.

"Kill Batman."

* * *


End file.
